


Trick or Treat in Starling City

by BardicRaven



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Costumes, Gen, Halloween, Halloween Costumes, Loss of Innocence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-20 14:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16138802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardicRaven/pseuds/BardicRaven
Summary: Quentin Lance looks around the bunker on Hallowe'en's Eve and feels old.





	Trick or Treat in Starling City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cyren2132](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyren2132/gifts).



Quentin Lance looked around the bunker and sighed, suddenly feeling so much older than his years. He could blame some of it on the life he’d led – the badge, the wasted years to the bottle – but not all of it. He could even blame some of it on the boys in green – and red, and black. Goodness knew that keeping their secrets and finding an uneasy compromise between the oaths he’d taken and the reality of the world around him, the letter of the law and its spirit, was enough to give a better man grey hair and a case of the blues, never mind himself.

He mused that once upon a time, not just in Starling City, but everywhere, masks were for parties, for play, for Hallowe’en and pretending, for rituals and serious stuff even, depending on your culture. In any case, not for going into the night to try and make a city a better place to live, to save it from itself and those who would destroy it.

But now… now was a different time, tho’ no different in place. There were those who came to take their shot at the city on a regular basis (every May, like clockwork, he noted sourly). Dangerous people, yes, even evil people. Once upon a time, he’d thought not to use the word, to trust that everyone, no matter what they’d done or who they were, could be rehabilitated.

Then he hit the streets and learned about the reality of it all.

Which was why he supported them, at the end of the day. As much as his cop-senses told him that going outside the law wasn’t the way to do it, his heart told him the truth: that sometimes, the only way to serve the law was to go outside it.

A lesson painfully learned. A lesson learned not without cost. But a lesson he’d finally come to terms with.

Which was why he was here now, looking around him at masks that would never be used for Trick or Treat, never worn with the innocence of youth. Masks that were used for fighting a war, a war, he knew, that would never be won.

Could never be won.

Humanity was what it was – all the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of it.

Ultimately, nothing would ever come of what they did. It couldn’t, not without destroying everything that made humanity human.

But that didn’t mean they shouldn’t try.

He pulled himself together and went in search of Felicity. Crime, and crimefighters, after all, waited for no one.

Even on Hallowe’en.


End file.
